“Nowhere in my house!” cried the old lady. “I won’t hear of it! It’s disgraceful! It’s vulgar! I won’t have it!”
“I must!” said Minnie, “I’ve made up my mind. I can’t and won’t go on this way. Either you’ll let me have this boarder or I’ll have to go into Mr. Petersen’s office.”
They argued, wrangled, remonstrated. It was of vital importance to them both. To the old lady a boarder meant incalculable loss of dignity, it meant degradation. She defended her position vehemently, fought to the last ditch for her honour.
But Minnie won. Her grandmother’s resistance crumpled at last before her iron determination. She went up to bed that night in a sort of ecstasy of triumph, drunk with her first victory. Her career had begun. The tiger had tasted blood.
III
She met with some slight opposition from Frances, loyally concealed until they were alone, but this she easily ended by a great deal of talk about the necessity of earning a living.
That’s what she called it; never facing the truth. If someone else had confronted her with it, she very likely wouldn’t have recognised it. Even in her own soul she called it a chance to “earn a living,” when it was really nothing but a ferocious determination to seek another man before accepting Mr. Petersen. She was resolved upon getting married. Mr. Petersen she would take if no one else presented, but not without a struggle, a gallant struggle to find a better. No one, nothing should balk her of this literary man from New York.
It was another little triumph, too, to be the object of such deep interest to her sister. They sat in the gloomy, cold bedroom, Frances on the bed with a blanket round her shoulders, while Minnie, erect on a broken little chair near the lamp, combed her heavy black hair with conscientious vigour.
“How on earth did you ever find him?” Frances asked.
“I saw his advertisement in a New York paper; he wanted country board some place where he could be quiet, for his writing. So I answered it.”